18/ Instead, the researchers say that experts do the following (read):
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19/ What does this have to do with note-taking?
Well, now that we have the four big ideas, we can invert CFT's claims to get the pedagogical recommendations:
1. Expand the cases you know, so you have a larger set of fragments to draw from.
2. Inculcate the adaptive worldview.
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20/ And how do the researchers recommend doing this?
The researchers note that you cannot reduce cases, and real world cases tend to be rich with many concepts. So ... the researchers recommend using a hypermedia system to store cases.
That is: a backlinked note taking system!
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21/ Here's what you do: you get the student to store cases, and highlight concepts within the text of each case. Concepts are backlinked. They go to other cases.
There are many variations. Some systems come preloaded with cases, marked up by expert practitioners.
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22/ The initial presentation to the student is also chosen carefully. When presenting a concept for the first time, you want to give a student a case, and then give them a different case that is VERY different from the first.
So the student internalises that cases are variable!
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23/ Eventually, as the student does concept searches in the CFT system, they begin to overlearn the 'crossroad' cases — that is, the central cases that are the most conceptually rich and therefore the most connected.
These cases begin to be evoked from even small fragments.
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24/ Once this happens, the student enters something called 'epitome mode', where case comparisons happen at the speed of thought.
In other words, they have a set of representative cases in their heads, available for on-the-fly schema assembly in the real world.
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25/ Ok, I'll wrap up. A couple of days ago, I said that it's probably worth it to dig for cognitive science results in the tools for thought space.
CFT is an example of what I was talking about.
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Increasingly curious as to why the tools-for-thought folk talk a lot about note-taking tool features and plugins and not at all about the cognitive science of better externalised thinking.
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26/ If you enjoyed this thread, you should read the full essay, which goes into way more detail on how to create a CFT system for yourself:
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27/ I also write a newsletter: commoncog.com/blog/subscribe where you can subscribe for updates on essays like this. I mostly write about better business and career decision making.
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28/ Finally, you can follow me on Twitter, where I write about expertise acceleration from time to time. Here's a thread on that: twitter.com/ejames_c/statu
Thank you for reading! 🙇♂️
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1/ Let's talk about accelerating expertise.
You want to get good. You want to get good fast. How do you do this?
In 2008 and 2009 the US Department of Defence convened two meetings on this very topic.
Here's what they found. (Hint: the answer is NOT deliberate practice).
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I love that you took the time to break it down into a series of tweets. I think it finally clicked for me when you said concepts = clusters of cases and that they construct concepts on the fly from fragments of cases
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Oh yeah, I really struggled with this too.
I think first principles thinking is a better match for the way I’ve been trained to think.
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I never thought about the distinction between principles and analogies. Physics is the prototypical example of thinking from first principles, but at the same time, many breakthroughs happen via analogy.
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This brings to mind Case-Based Reasoning, an AI technique based on matching similar cases in a case base.
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